If you put a person on the earth, they are content. I feel like we forget that. This person will naturally build shelter, hunt and gather for food, and seek out other people to establish friendship and companionship. Given enough time, these various groups of homosapiens will make things. After millions of years, they'll organize themselves into companies, governments, and religions. The walls of society will go up.

Living off the land as we have for our entire existence will be seen as strange. Unless you're a farmer giving back to the society you're born into, self-sustaining living is seen as a bit off-your-rocker. To be independent is to be suspicious in our society, I feel like. Our society wants to keep you in, when it comes right down to it. We want you to stay in our materialistic culture, and to keep buying things. Someone who lives a life of fulfillment by having a garden, doing DIY projects, and rejecting material wealth is not very useful to us. They don't give back to society in any way, but they don't take - they're cut out, making brief appearances at the gas station whenever necessary.

What is it about simple-living that makes people look at it weirdly? It's because it's not sexy. No, really. In our culture we've attached material wealth to sexiness. We have marketed cars, jewelry, clothes, music, technology, alcohol, food, and most every other pillar of society in a sexual way. If you buy a product, you'll get <x> girl/guy. Jewelry, clothes, makeup, and cologne/perfume companies are the most guilty of this. The incredibly attractive models with even more eye-candy of the opposite sex latched onto them because they have <x> brand. Every alcohol commercial is hot guys/hot girls having a good time.

So - all of this. All of these parts of the culture you grew up in are all tied back to sex. If you have these materials, someone will want you more! Because you smell better with that Gucci cologne, dress better when you shop at Nordstrom, drive a 2014 Ford Fusion, have a Macbook, or you're wearing a Citizen watch.

A quote from this video @4:30 which was posted over at r/buddhism seems apt.
"We tend to regard our greed, anger and delusion as our friends. Then again, we live in a society where everybody takes it for granted that people are going to be greedy, angry and deluded; and the society is arranged to take advantage of that. How many times have people complained to me 'Well, if you live content with very little, the economy is going to collapse'. Well, if the economy is based on anger, greed and delusion, maybe it should collapse. It is causing people to do unskillful things, to think and act in unskillful ways ... So the things you "have to do" to get ahead, if they are done out of greed anger or delusion, you are better off not doing them. Because they have long-term consequences down the line" - Ajahn Geoffrey

But if you are happy because you are at peace with the world, that's not something you can easily share/give to someone who's intrinsically unhappy. You can try to teach them, but they have to put in real effort to learn it. And only people who are already happy with the world can see that in you and share in that joy.

If you're happy because you have a ton of stuff, that's something that you can easily give/share with people who are unhappy (either by actually giving them things or teaching them the 3 quick steps of how to make money). So they're more attracted to that.

Ads make people unhappy. The forced 40 hour work weeks make people unhappy. So I think the majority of people are actually pretty unhappy, and therefore choose the second way to be attracted to people.

I think if it doesn't make them happy, then they are doing it wrong or they are not the type of people who should be doing it.

I think of simple living as a way to practice detachment. Which is to say, not everyone needs to do it in order to be at peace with the world, but for some people, it is a good way to jumpstart the mental process. I know that for me, getting rid of some (not all!) things has been good for me. It has helped me focus on the things that I actually care about and it has given me more financial freedom (so more mental energy to focus on the things I care about).

I think anti-materialism is just as arbitrary as collecting stuff for its own sake. In that way, they are equally un-sexy.
Now, if you live the life that does make you happy, and you do it deliberately, then I think that's sexy as hell. Live your life with passion and strip away the bullshit, whether it's material or something else.

We weren't built to organize ourselves into companies, governments and organized religions. We were built to roam around as hunter gatherers. We just stumbled across this thing called "agriculture" and settled down. Some of us figured out how to work the new social order and accumulated money and power, since accumulating wealth and controlling large groups of people became possible.

But sometimes we yearn for something more, because we weren't made to be specialized, sedentary cogs in a large society. We were meant to travel around in small tribes, cooperate, and live off the land. Sure, it wasn't perfect, and our ancestors certainly had our hardships - they were nowhere near as safe as we are today - but I can't help but wonder if life was better for our hunter gatherer ancestors, because they had what we lack: a real sense of community and a connection to nature.

Yes, of course we're very adaptable, and we're absolutely excellent at surviving now. That's all evolution cares about: survival. (And of course, I realize evolution has no end goal or purpose - it's just nature playing itself out.)

But due to our background as hunter gatherers, we have needs that often are trampled upon in modern societies and it feels like an imperfect fit. We barely even know the people who surround us every day, where before we used to be intimately involved with their everyday life. We have aggression that is ill suited for modern life. It may have helped battling ancient tribes, but it sure doesn't help us on our daily commute or interaction with neighbors.

Obviously, I'm taking some poetic license by saying "we weren't BUILT for X." I believe the universe is mechanistic, playing itself out according to the laws in place and initial conditions. I'm just suggesting that we may have found more meaning living in tribes, and we might have been happier, too. Modern society can seem so callous and meaningless because our bodies were configured to be good tribe members - or at least successfully reproducing ones. Tribal life was the norm for the vast majority of our time on earth and evolution has tuned us to work in that environment.

Our background as hunter gatherers is the default way that animals live. Most aren't smart enough to develop better ways to live, like tool usage, or agriculture.

If you don't know the people who surround you every day, your neighbours, or coworkers. Than that is your problem, not some human nature/instinct clashing against modern society.

I will agree with a few things. Humans didn't evolve to do the major kinds of work that happens in cities, namely sitting in a chair at a desk, we evolved to be active throughout most of the day. But we didn't evolve to not live in cities, we didn't evolve to live in small villages or tribal groups, that is outside of evolution, that is nurture, not nature.

We learned to stick with family because it is easier, then we learned that multiple families working together make it even easier than that, and so on and so forth, the group getting larger and larger, til we have nation-states.

I also would argue that our bodies aren't configured to be good tribe members. Monogamy for instance, is a largely taught construct for men. The glans(head) of the male penis even evolved in such a way that it acts like a scoop, to scrape a rival suitors semen out of the current mate.

Tribal life was the norm, but only because we didn't know any better. Evolutionarily speaking, we haven't changed that much since all humans were hunter-gatherers.

Creation of the concept of money after the adoption of agriculture allowed a certain class of people to live off the labor of others. If you live in the modern world you are exploiting others and being exploited, in addition to destroying the natural world.

I have to disagree. What you say applies to some part of the society but not all of it.

At least in my social environment most women understand that money is just a way to get freedom. Simple living gives you more freedom because money lasts longer. Im not poor but I dont want much. I know a multi millionaire who loves his job and lives a very very simple life. My business is also extremely low maintenance that I have time for other things. Especially now with new technologies simple living doesnt mean you have to be poor and smart women also understand what matters (and they dont have to be hippies for that).

Being poor and therefore being forced to have little choices and freedom isnt desirable.

I subscribe to thoughts like these but I constantly come back to the same conclusion. We are living in a very material, consumer life that is designed to leave us dissatisfied with everything. But it is important to realise it is better than any lifestyle that has come before us(arguable I know, but I'm talking about general health and well-being).
It is not perfect but it is a way for large scale society to work reasonably well. It might seem logically flawed and we should be pioneering new ways of living, but it's really not that bad.

I am 100% a simple lifer--- and also have a masters in evolutionary anthropology and a bachelors in biological evolution. While I agree with your sentiment, the science just doesn't back up what you say.

Minor gripe: your timeline is off. Human timescales can only be measured in thousands of years, rather than millions. H. sapiens has only existed for around 195,000 years. Of that, H. s. sapiens has only been a diverged subspecies for 115,000 years. Previously, it was H. s. idaltu. Assuming there was little social information transfer between H. sapiens and other members of Homo (because there is no evidence of this), that indicates that modern society was developed over 195,000 years at the most.